There is hardly anybody good for everything, and there is scarcely anybody who is absolutely good for nothing.

Good-breeding carries along with it a dignity that is respected by the most petulant. Ill-breeding invites and authorizes the familiarity of the most timid.

It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment; the former is never forgiven, but the later is sometimes forgotten.

There is hardly any place or any company where you may not gain knowledge, if you please; almost everybody knows some one thing, and is glad to talk about that one thing.

Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other.

There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurtsnobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly.

All I desire for my own burial, is not to be buried alive; but how or where, I think, must be entirely indifferent to every rational creature.